Sunday, December 07, 2008

Live Now, Pay Later is remembered as a startling film, not least for the boost to the early career of Jack Trevor Storywho is credited as scriptwriter. It appears this was based on the novel(?) published by Frederick Muller in 1961 and later as a lurid paperback All on the Never, Never. JTS capitalised on the film's success and "novelised" the film script as "Live now Pay Later" which was published originaly by Secker and Warburg and then by Penguin as a paperback.

The back cover blurb on AOTNN .... "The trouble with Iris is that she can't resist buying things on Hire Purchase. She can't meet the payments so she attempts to solve her difficulties by trying to sell her body. She doesn't find it an easy way of balancing the budget."

Jack Lindsay, 1900 - 1990, was a prolific, author, poet, editor of journals, translator of the classics and from the late 1930s a convert to the Communist Party of Great Britain, after which he also wrote about Marxist issues.

The film also launched the nascent careers of Ian Hendry (1931 - 1984) ,Liz Fraserand Kiwi Nyree Dawn Porter(1936-2001) - falmost all for being filmed with almost all of their kit nearly off.

Callendar: There's 200,000 consumers in this town, and they're all waiting for you... just you.

Albert: Yeah, to con 'em into buying a whole load of stuff they don't need and can't afford.

Perhaps the current and well supported plans of Gordon Brown to plunge us all into a deeper mire of personal and national debt has it's origins in those heady days when Harold Macmillan - "SuperMac" told us all, "We had never had it so Good"... and Ian Hendry's randy male selfishness and his single mum girlfriend Treasure , were straws in the wind identifying the social changes that reflected the days of easier credit.